1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing device which receives ink from a replaceable ink cartridge and ejects ink droplets through nozzle orifices thereof onto a printing medium to visually record text and graphic data on the medium.
2. Related Art
The ink jet printing device includes a printhead and an ink cartridge for supplying ink to the printhead. The printhead receives print data and generates drive signal based on the print data, applies them to piezoelectric transducing elements or heat generating means to generate mechanical or thermal energy, and pressurizes ink droplets by the generated energy to eject ink droplets through the nozzle orifices thereof.
The print quality of a printed product of a printing device is determined by various factors, such as printhead resolution, ink viscosity, and ink spread in the printing medium. For improving the print quality, various approaches have been made: ink characteristic improvement, orifice diameter variation in conformity with the ink characteristic of an ink selected from among inks of the same color, changing of a quantity of an ink droplet, printhead drive method manipulation and others. An additional approach is to improve the maintenance work. Some examples of this approach are to appropriately set the period of the flushing for orifice clogging prevention, and to forcibly discharge ink from the printhead by sucking ink from the printhead being capped.
To secure a print quality of a printed product and reliability of the device, it is essential that the printhead is compatible with an ink cartridge, viz., a kind of ink contained. To this end, it is necessary to recognize and discriminate a kind of ink cartridge and the nature of ink, to grasp a type of the printhead, and to judge whether or not the printhead is compatible with the ink cartridge.
The printed product is used in various ways. For example, the print product can be used for an outdoor display, such as a poster. The poster needs to be water resistant although there is no need for it to last for a long time. The print product can also be used for storage purposes. One example is a hard copy produced by a digital camera. A light-resistant nature is required for the hard copy. There are cases where the use purpose of one print product is greatly different from that of another. An example of this case is the combination of the poster and the hard copy of the digital camera. When the printing device has been used for printing the posters and then is used for printing hard copies, the kind of ink thus far used must be changed to another kind of ink. In this case, the ink cartridge must also be replaced with another containing the ink to be used.
The ink cartridges used for the ink jet printing device are categorized into two types of ink cartridges, an ink cartridge containing black ink and an ink cartridge containing color ink or inks. Therefore, when one print purpose is changed to another print purpose, those ink cartridges must be changed to the ink cartridges suitable for the latter print purpose.
As described above, either in the case of a printing device with a printhead which has a long lifetime and is replaced with another printhead every time the print purpose is changed to another or in the case of a printing device using a disposable printhead of which the lifetime is much shorter than that of the printing device, the combination of the printhead and the ink cartridge is frequently changed. Therefore, it is necessary to exactly judge the compatibility of the printhead with the ink cartridge.
For the reasons mentioned above, an object of the present invention is to provide an ink jet printing device which is capable of judging the compatibility of a print head with an ink cartridge as mounted, to thereby avoid any misprinting and also to prevent the print head from being damaged due to an improper ink cartridge.
A second object of the invention is to provide an ink jet printing device in which, when a plurality of ink cartridges are employed, the printing device performs a printing operation when the ink cartridges as mounted are compatible with each other, so that the print quality and reliability can be assured.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an ink cartridge adaptable for an ink jet printing device having the above advantages.
To achieve the above objects, the present invention provides an ink jet printing device having a printhead for ejecting ink in the form of ink droplets, an ink cartridge for supplying ink to the printhead, and control means for controlling the printhead in accordance with print data. The ink jet printing device of the present invention is improved by first storage means, provided on a printhead, for storing data of a type of the printhead; second storage means, provided on an ink cartridge, for storing data of a kind of ink contained in the ink cartridge and types of printheads compatible with the ink cartridge; and control means operating such that the control means judges whether or not an ink cartridge is compatible with a printhead on the basis of data read out of the first and second storage means, and which causes the ink jet printing device to perform a printing operation when the ink cartridge is compatible with the printhead.
The ink jet printing device drives the printhead so that the printhead is compatible with a kind of ink, on the basis of data stored in the first and second storage means, and performs a printing operation, and further an ejection-recovery operation and an ink charging operation.